Rainy Days at School

On rainy days the classroom

smells like mud from the swamp

the school is built upon. We stand

in an alphabetical line for lunch,

the mud from our shoes gradually

shading the floor with a grayish

patina. We walk/march in lined

unison to the cafeteria four our feast

of mystery meat in gravy, boiled

spinach with a slice of boiled egg,

beets and other delicacies to affront

the childish palate. I wasn’t Catholic

but I loved Fridays because it was

always fish on Fridays. At recess

we have Polar Bars or Fudgcicles or

Dreamcicles, to wash away

the taste of beets, the smell of mud.

Lunch is a quarter, ice cream

a nickel and much the better

value for the money.

This poem is submitted for Open Link Night at dVerse Poets. To see more poems, please visited the site. Links will be live at 2 p.m. Central time.

This is also one on a series of poems about growing up in the South, suggested by my friend Nancy Rosback. We didn’t have boiled spinach and beets every day in our school cafeteria, but those are the foods that have lingered in memory. (Our cafeteria workers also never looked as cheerful as those in the photograph.)

Photograph courtesy Grand Island Pictures from the Past.